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A Gun in the First Act…

It’s feeling like possibilities are becoming probabilities are becoming inevitabilities….

My little two-week science experiment with estrogen — while not a smart idea, don’t try this at home kids… — does seem to provided a useful data point. On hormones I was a calmer, the gender static in my head got quieter. Off hormones it’s come back.

It wasn’t a dramatic difference, perhaps because as it turns out, I already had abnormally low testosterone levels, enough that my doctor wants to retest next week just to be sure, and I intentionally took the bare minimum dose of estrogen. But it was a significant difference. Was it truly hormonal-related? Was it placebo effect? Obviously I can’t be sure. When I start hormones under a doctor’s care in April, that’ll probably be truer test.

Meantime my self of being a man seems to be sublimating directly into the ether. I’ve never felt especially male per se, and masculinity was never the greatest fit. But now it feels like I’m drifting further and further from shore and it’s disappearing below the horizon. It’s a little hard to put words to it, moving through the world as a man isn’t a facade — it’s not fake, it’s still me, but it’s not me. It’s the trusty old work truck. It’s a persona I slip on, just as I slip on my work persona.

But… OTOH, I don’t quite feel like a woman either. Maybe it’s insecurity, maybe it’s not fully believing in myself yet. Maybe it’s just that I’ll always feel a bit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum — I can still see how I could be happy living a bigendered life if things had taken a different turn, and there were more things to anchor me to the male side of things.

But even if I don’t feel fully a woman, I do know that I seem to be more comfortable and happier living as woman.

I know that I do feel more at home in my body when it’s more female in appearance. For whatever reason that feeling’s gotten stronger during the past year. Some things I can’t, at least until someone invents shoulder narrowing and pelvic widening surgery. Some things I can — and probably will — change. As Kai Cheng Thom said: “I can relate to my body, transform my body, from a place of joy instead of anger and fear.”

Likewise, I don’t hate living as man, if I needed to, I could probably continue doing so for quite a while. It’s not transition or die for me. It’s more I’ve done five decades of the guy thing and I’m ready for something different. There wasn’t any crystallizing moment, I seemed to meandered to the point.

I may still get cold feet. It is a daunting prospect. But yeah, it does seems like I’m ready for a change.